Election results live updates: Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa battle for votes in NYC mayoral race

Democrat Ghazala Hashmi has been named the projected winner in Virginia’s lieutenant governor race.

Hashmi is currently leading Republican John Reid 53.2 to 46.5 percent, according to NBC News.

It’s pretty rare for someone from Massachusetts to compliment someone from New York City. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the populist Democratic vanguard and former presidential candidate, said Zohran Mamdani’s campaign had lessons for the rest of the Democratic Party.

Warren ran for president in 2020, but unlike her fellow progressive, she failed to win any states largely thanks to her limited reach and the inability to convince voters of color to back her. Nonetheless, enthusiastically backed Mamdani’s candidacy given its focus on taking on the wealthy and powerful interests.

“I think it’s looking good,” she told The Independent.

Warren praised Mamdani’s focus on affordability. For much of 2024, worries about inflation and the cost of living plagued Democrats. Mamdani has focused heavily on housing affordability, freezing rent, free buses and childcare.

Warren told The Independent that the party could learn “that Americans care about what living costs them every day.”

“Zohran put together an entire campaign around bringing down the cost of child care, groceries and transportation, and he’s going to win on it,” she told The Independent.

Eric’s takeaway: Mamdani’s coalition is in many ways the perfect blend of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential coalition of non-college-educated voters, Latino voters and men alongside Warren’s coalition of college-educated white voters.

In the end, those disparate factions failed to beat the normal vote that catapults a Democrat to the nomination: majority support from the African American community. That bolstered Joe Biden in 2020. But a fusion of these disparate coalitions might give progressives a foot in the door and–more importantly–convince Black voters they can win.

Democrat Aftab Pureval has won reelection as mayor of Cincinnati over Republican Cory Bowman, the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance, the Associated Press reports.

Democrat Andre Dickens also won reelection, per AP.

Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill is currently beating former Republican state legislator Jack Ciattarelli 64.4 to 35.1 percent after the polls in New Jersey closed, per NBC News.

The polls have closed in New Jersey, but anyone in line at 8 p.m. ET will be allowed to cast a ballot.

Democrats in Passaic County had sued to keep New Jersey polls open for an extra hour on Election Day after non-credible bomb threats were made earlier in the day.

Passaic County received three threats early Tuesday, county spokesperson Lindsay Reed told the Associated Press.

Reed said some voters were redirected to other polling locations in the swing county with about 340,000 registered voters.

Former Democratic congresswoman Abigail Spanberger is named the projected winner over Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, according to multiple outlets.

Spanberger will be the first female governor in Virginia.

A majority of voters in New Jersey and Virginia disapprove of the way President Donald Trump has handled his job.

According to NBC News exit polls, 55 percent of New Jersey voters and 56 percent of Virginia voters disapprove of Trump’s job as president, while 43 percent and 41 percent approve, respectively.

Three hours before polls close, election day turnout in New York City has already smashed records, with more than 1.75 million votes cast as of 6 p.m. local time, according to the New York City Board of Elections. You’d have to go back to 1993 when Rudy Giuliani was running to find comparable numbers.

That includes more than 735,000 early in-person votes, but doesn’t include more than 102,000 mail-in ballots.

Roughly 300,000 votes were cast within just the last few hours.

Roughly 1.15 million New Yorkers, or just 23 percent of the city’s active registered voters, cast ballots in the 2021 race that saw Eric Adams elected to the mayor’s office.

The total turnout is expected to easily exceed 2 million by the time all ballots are in.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for New York City’s mayoral race, has shared an image of his iconic red beret as the bat-signal in an Election Day push for voters hours before the polls close.

Sliwa is known for wearing a red beret as part of his getup for the Guardian Angels, a group the mayoral candidate started in the late 1970s to promote community safety on the streets of New York City.

Riffing off the famous distress symbol used in the fictional Gotham City to request help from superhero Batman, Sliwa urged New Yorkers to vote.

“3 hours left! Let’s do it New York!” he wrote in an X post Tuesday evening.